Customer Service Week: 4 Steps to Transforming Contact Center Performance

Contact centers convert from a transactional focus to one that emphasizes an emotional connection with each client in this four-step model.
By William Seidman, Rick Grbavac

Call centers are a critical element in an organizations customer service and/or sales strategy. Inbound centers that focus primarily on fixing customer issues are often the last line of defense before losing the customer. And sales call centers are a low-cost way to sell to high volumes of clients, including ones in remote locations. However, most call centers are extremely transactional, focusing on narrow measures of performance. They measure and reward or punish for specific metrics such as time on a call, number of dials, sales per week, and escalations per week. Many of these measures have a dehumanizing and selfdefeating impact. For example, a call center that emphasized keeping all calls at less than two minutes saw escalations soar and customer satisfaction plummet as the customer service representative dumped calls that might be lengthy. This transactional emphasis is particularly offensive and discouraging to the millennials. They want to engage with customers and create social value, and not become forced into confining interactions.

New Science for Call Center Research Development

New research in four areas: positive deviance, fair process, neuroscience, and mass customization, has led to the development of a four-step talent development model that converts call centers to a transformational focus emphasizing an emotional connection with each client. This approach has reduced call center turnover to as little as 2 percent while significantly improving customer satisfaction and sales metrics. Set the Bar for Performance: Identify your positive deviant customer service representatives or telesales people. These are typically the older, more experienced people who are highly respected for their ability to perform all of the diverse functions of the role. They conceive of their role in transformational

terms, emphasizing creating a greater social good for their customers. Their secret sauce can be discovered in just three days using a process called Wisdom Discovery. Motivate Great Performance: Motivate call center personnel, particularly the new hires, to think and act transformationally by presenting the positive deviant secret sauce using positive images of success to enhance their honor and dignity. This causes a release of neural chemicals that promote openness to new ideas and increases the speed of learning. Sustain Great Performance: Define a sequence of weekly, applied learning experiences that drive frequent, practical usage of the positive deviant wisdom. Provide call center personnel with activities to practice, discuss, and record judgments about complex situations. This causes neurons to rewire into the new, desired long-term attitudes and behaviors. Scale Greatness: Guide call center personnel to consistently utilize positive deviant knowledge while driving them to apply this knowledge in ways that create unique value for them and their customers. This gives the organization the capability to get all of the benefits of mass production, e.g. economies of scale, consistency and quality, while further encouraging and developing peoples judgment. These four steps are a simple, proven way to align teams with the greater social good and create transformational call centers. Call centers only become great if the management team supports a change to transformational values and processes. Call center management must give customer-facing personnel the time to learn new attitudes and behaviors, as well as some relief from daily transactional goals. n
About the Authors:

William Seidman, Ph.D., is CEO of Cerebyte Rick Grbavac is Vice President of Cerebyte

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